Santoro's Roast Beef Sub, with Mayo and Salt

[Santoro’s is a dumpy sub shop that abuts a gas station and somehow ended up in the same parking lot. For all intents and purposes, it’s a hole in the wall that is unmentionable in every instance of the word. It also had the grave misfortune of being in Carver, Massachusetts which has been put on the map by a renaissance fare and exactly nothing else.]

Back in my Councilor days, when we’d cart children around the state in giant yellow busses, we’d frequent the recreation facility that was a lot over from Santoro’s. It was standard fare; potato sack slide, go karts, bumper boats, arcade games, all plopped out here in the middle of Carver like some runaway carnival that went off to join Thoreau.

Being the kind of charming young lad that I am, I’d managed to make strong ties to one of the men who oversaw this particular camp, and as such when he’d break off from these field trips, he drag me along with him. It was here, that I would come to encounter the dump known as Santoro’s.

I remember when we pulled up on it his exclamation of excitement “yeah brow….San-Toro’s” with the end of that broken abbreviation hitting a higher than needed falsetto. I took from that I might be in for some remarkable cuisine here in this growth on the side of a Mobil station. I wasn’t.

Santoro’s was just another dive pizza joint, only as Massachusetts can. A Greek family masquerading around as some Italian family, making pizzas for blue-collar Americans that don’t know the difference and wouldn’t care anyway. (You mean the Greeks don’t eat pizza?) And thinking back on it, I couldn’t possibly imagine why the hell anyone would get excited for such a dump in the first place, and as any writer does, I had to come again to the conclusion that things that I see are just observations, and that my opinions are irrelevant. If you’ve been given perception beyond the tangible, you ought to use it.

Santoro’s could have been Jim’s Tire Store, or Guadalupe’s, the place really wasn’t relevant. Its more like a pragmatic American Dream. That we’d all risen high enough to fuck off at our job, and occasionally leave a ton of children in the charge of another group of people who’s judgment was questionable and, given that we were at an amusement park, whose attention spans might be lowered to lethal levels. We were out, we were free, and we were on the clock. It didn’t matter if we’d gone to buy stamps, I’m sure we’d have found an air conditioner to stand in front of and rationalize that in fact, this was the life.

I have been working myself toward an Old Money dream, one in which I shirk the low class mentality of the farm land I grew up on, one in which people conduct themselves with a degree of cosmopolitan air regardless of what their doing. To me being high class should come with being American. To live, as Bobby Kennedy suggest, for the people, not off the people. But whether they lack the money, refinement, or perpetual optimism to carry themselves in such a manner, there are those who don’t have such a high brow view of how things ought to be. Education was never a big point for them, neither to was propriety, and who says it ought to be. But I spend too much time lamenting this reality and not enough realizing that these are people who are lost in a dream, where the closest pizza joint can be the break from a bleak and doldrums-filled existence. Where the air conditioner at the post office, or the grade C meat at some dive pub can be all the difference in the world.

Sometimes when I look back I can see a scrap-book collage of still-framed images fading there over time, where you can see the joy in the face of a man who had lines from the hard life he lived and for logical or illogical reasons, the rough path he choose. I am, for all my graces, still no different than they are. We all look down upon one another for varying reasons, and to another man we may be equally as flawed. But though I’d never choose to descend to that level, or conduct myself in that fashion, I can still see the beautiful paintings that are created from their own emotional crescendo, and in those images, I might find myself something to write, a literary sea chantey I can’t stop whistling, even if its about some junk box sub shop, fading in the sun of old memories.